Swatting hoaxes pose risks and challenges

One Sunday evening two years ago, a heavily armed team of police officers drew their guns and cautiously approached the Melrose home of U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark.

Unaware of their presence, the Democratic congresswoman was enjoying a quiet evening watching TV while her two youngest children were asleep upstairs.

“I noticed a lot of police lights on the front lawn,” Clark recalled. “As they didn’t go away, I became concerned something had happened to a neighbor. I stepped out of the house to investigate and discovered police on my lawn with long guns and police approaching our house. There was a moment of real fear at what was transpiring.”

After speaking with an officer on scene, Clark soon realized she was the victim of “swatting,” a hoax in which someone calls police to falsely report an emergency in the hopes of drawing a SWAT team to the home of the prank’s intended target. In Clark’s case, an unknown person contacted law enforcement to falsely claim there was an active shooter in her home.

The results of swatting hoaxes can sometimes turn tragic, as they did in a Dec. 28 incident in Wichita, Kansas. After receiving a report of a homicide and active hostage situation, Wichita police rushed to the home of 28-year-old Andrew Finch. When Finch came to the door, he was fatally shot by an officer who mistakenly thought Finch was reaching for a gun, police said.

It turned out Finch was unarmed, and the reports of a homicide and hostage situation were false. The incident, investigators said, appears to have been a swatting hoax that originated in a dispute between online gamers. Nearly 1,400 miles away in Los Angeles, police arrested accused swatter Tyler Barriss, 25, on suspicion of making the false police call that led to the fatal police shooting in Kansas.

Swatting is a prank that rose to prominence in the world of online gaming, authorities say. The swatters sometimes try to watch the results of the hoax on a live streaming camera set up for gaming.

There are an estimated 400 swatting incidents each year nationally.

Perpetrators often use sophisticated technology to conceal their identity and trick emergency responders into thinking a call is coming from the swatting target’s address.

While swatting is on their radar, police need to take all threats seriously, potentially putting officers in challenging situations.

“Any call has to be treated as legitimate and an appropriate response deployed, because there will be that one time that the emergency is real, and law enforcement officers have to be present and prepared to act,” said Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio. “If a call turns out to be a hoax, we can and do conduct follow-up investigations, as do local police and the FBI.”

MetroWest is not immune to swatting incidents. In 2015, a still unknown caller told police that he put a bomb in the Hopkinton library, drawing officers from numerous communities, as well as a regional SWAT team to the area. The threat was determined to be a hoax.

In two separate incidents in April 2015, Framingham Police went to homes for incidents that also turned out to be hoax calls. In one, a man said he planned on shooting police officers and was waiting for them outside of his Nicholas Road home. Police briefly detained the resident, but later determined he had nothing to do with the call.

In the other incident, a man using a blocked number, called 911 about 5 a.m. and told Framingham Police that he was “off his meds,” shot his girlfriend and had his father tied up in the bathroom. He demanded to speak to a hostage negotiator or he would kill himself. When police arrived on what they thought was a crime scene, they found the resident asleep in bed.

In October 2014, Ashland Police responded to a call from a man who claimed his girlfriend was trying to shoot him. The phone number matched the address where police went, but the number had been spoofed, police said.

Closely related to swatting, false bomb threats in schools have also become increasingly common in Massachusetts in recent years, Procopio said.

Just over a year ago, a 17-year-old Andover man accused of leading a group of hackers pleaded guilty to conspiracy and bomb threat charges. An investigation by the state police and the Essex District Attorney’s Office alleged the teen and his group of hackers were linked to multiple swatting and bomb hoaxes across the country in 2016.

The teen, police said, was behind 2016 swatting calls involving Jordan’s Furniture IMAX Theaters in Natick and Reading, as well as false 911 calls in Florida, New York and Rhode Island. Investigators also linked him to swatting calls in Woburn and Wilmington.

As for Clark, the identity of her swatter remains unknown. But she doesn’t think it was a coincidence that she was targeted. Just a couple months before the incident, Clark had just introduced legislation intended to combat online harassment and swatting. She suspects someone swatted her in retaliation for her bill.

“The timing seemed too significant to be a coincidence,” she said.

She re-filed the bill this session and hopes to see it pass. The bill, which has bipartisan support, currently sits in the House Judiciary Committee.

“How do we update laws and police training to combat severe online abuse and harassment? There is often a mismatch depending on which state or jurisdiction you’re in between the crime of swatting and existing statutes,” said Clark.

While making false police reports is already a crime, Clark said her bill would improve responses to incidents that occur across state lines.

“It would eliminate jurisdictional issues. Calls can be made anywhere across state lines or international lines,” she said. “This would allow local law enforcement to quickly access the FBI and the resources they have to fight cyber crimes.”

THE ISSUE: Swatting, a hoax that involves making false reports to police to draw a SWAT team to someone’s home, has become increasingly common in recent years.

THE IMPACT: There are approximately 400 swatting incidents nationally each year. A Dec. 28 incident in Kansas resulted in a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.